By Nina Serrano, Co-Director of Que Hacer/What Is to Be Done (1973)
Celebrating International Women’s Day 2018

Reflections on Que Hacer by Nina Serrano - YouTube

Reflections On Que Hacer

As one of the three directors of the film “Que Hacer/What Is To Be Done” shot in 1970 in Chile and commercially released in 1973, I watched the film again in 2018, only two years short of 50 years later. I have changed. The planet has changed. Chile has changed. But US imperialist foreign policy has not. Also unchanged is the dilemna of Americans like the film’s protagonist Suzanne McCloud, a disillusioned Peace Corps volunteer seeking change.

The film opens with the Chilean character Simon Vallejo observing that Latin American left unity must stay intact. He embraced Simon Bolivar’s call for continental unity, applying it to the need for strengthening Allende’s Unidad Popular coalition party.

Sandra Archer as Susan McCloud, protagonist of Que Hacer / What Is to Be Done (1973)

The female lead character Suzanne Mc Cloud turns for answers to the older, more seasoned Chilean intellectual revolutionary Simon, closely allied with Cuba and Fidel. He can not provide them. He says “Today’s answers will not be the same as tomorrow’s. You have to find them daily in your own reality.”

The making and scripting of the film itself was improvisational, reinventing itself each day in the changing context of the daily, volatile 1970 Chilean pre-election scene. Our guiding aesthetic decision was to create a “Brechtian” film that mixed fictional dramatic footage with documentary footage that we shot live as it happened. The actors improvised the dialogue while living and immersed in the situation.

Saul Landau, co-director, and Country Joe McDonald

We adapted German theatre artist and poet Bertolt Brecht’s idea that the audience should not be allowed to wallow in emotion. But rather, they should be jolted or distanced out of the emotional realm into the rational to begin thinking about the real life issues that the fictional situation raised. This technique often translates from the German as “alienation.”

In the film, we tried to develop this “alienating” effect through inserting the image and music Country Joe McDonald, whose haunting lyrics comment on the action at its climatic moments like a Greek chorus. Another distancing or alienating device is interposing interviews with leftist MIR leader Sergio Zorrilla. He critiques the fictional elements of the film with his theoretical remarks. We also interjected occasional shots of the film crew in action. We catch a glimpse of young Chilean filmmaker Jorge Mueller who served as camera assistant. Three years later after the 1973 coup he was thrown alive out of a helicopter by the Pinochet Military Junta. Many of the film participants were murdered, tortured, jailed, or exiled, causing a permanent pain in the lives of all of us who worked on the film.

Actor Richard Stahl, center, in documentary scene.

Pablo de la Barra, Chilean actor, as Hugo Alarcon

The documentary film footage also plays an alienating or distancing role because it is complicated by the appearance of the actors inside the live real documentary action. The violence in the film is both actual and acted. During the filming like in so many film shoots, accidents and physical injuries occur. When the actor Pablo de la Barra, playing the young militant, leaps into the Mapuche River after an aborted kidnapping, he was actually hurt. Three years later, after receiving the news of coup, I thought of him again when I learned that the river had turned bloody red from the military murders. The actors and crew believed in this anti-imperialist film and took risks, acting for real in the heightened election atmosphere of life and death.

The film still feels relevant 48 years later even with everything I now know and have experienced. Of course, Sandra Archer, the lead role, has passed, my co-directors Saul Landau and Raul Ruiz have passed. But the “regime change” actions of the United States and Latin America remains such as currently in Honduras, Venezuela and Cuba. This present administration is overtly greedy, racist, misogonist, zenophonic. They don’t even pretend to be kind or nice and even plans to create a bigger wall on the Mexican border. .

If we’re in Suzanne McCloud’s situation, where we feel like we want to be part of what she was calling “the revolution,” but what we today call “the resistance,” what do we do? That’s still the question. “Que hacer?” What is to be done?”

The seed of the idea for the film was first planted by Fidel Castro in Cuba, in 1969, a year before the filming. Castro had invited Saul, our children Greg, Valerie, and me for the TV viewing of the first US moon landing. As we were leaving, he commented “The next film you ought to make is a film about Chile because they’re going to have an election, which is going to change history. They might vote in socialism, bypassing revolution, deaths, and civil wars.”

For Saul and me, that was all we needed. Saul had made a documentary film about Fidel the year before in 1968. I worked on it but was not credited because KQED-TV insisted that wives should not get any credit, since it was our duty to just help our husbands. So when wives translated, or stayed up all night typing, or all the things that filmmakers’ wives often did in those days, we received no pay or credit. This time around, Saul and I decided to work together as equals in a film project.

We left excited from the meeting with Fidel Castro. Then, we began seriously researching the Chilean situation. We already had a lot of connections with Latin American left intellectuals. We had only the working title “The Ghost of Che.” That’s how it started.

Jim Beckett, co-producer and actor, as US Embassy staff.

One thing led to another. We joined forces with James Beckett as the producer and formed Lobo Films. I had worked with Sandra Archer in the SF Mime Toupe production of Moliere’s Tartuffe and was taking improv classes at The Committee. So finding San Francisco actors was relatively easy. I’d already worked with Country Joe Mc Donald on an anti-Vietnam war play. Saul Landau and Jim Beckett began the monumental task of raising money. They traveled to Chile, with a Chilean friend, Dario Pulgar. They recruited technical and administrative staff and Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz to direct the Chilean actors. By the election season of 1970, we had amassed a Chilean and US team of actors and production crew of about 40 people, made contact with the diverse Chilean left organizations, and rented a large communal house in Santiago to be our base. We agreed that I would direct the American actors, Raul Ruiz would direct the Chilean actors and Saul would direct the documentary filming.

Salvador Allende and Poet Pablo Neruda

It took 3 years to raise the funds and complete the editing in San Francisco. By the time the film was finished, and we had a film distibutor, the bloody Sept 11, 1973 coup happened. The New York City theatre where the movie was premiering was menaced by right wing-bomb threats. Nonetheless, we received a decent review from The New York Times and won international film awards in Manheim, Germany and Venice, Italy. Saul, Raul and I shared Best Direction award from the Venice film festival.

Saul Landau and I were by then separated. We both joined the international solidarity movement with the people of Chile. When Saul’s Chilean colleague Orlando Letelier was murdered by the Chilean Junta agents in Washington DC, he helped mount a successful intensive international investigation to bring the assassins to justice and wrote the prize winning book, “Murder on Embassy Row.”

I worked as the staff person for the San Francisco Free Chile Center, wrote and produced a play about the Chilean underground resistance called “Weavings” and produced Quilapayun’s “Cantata de Santa Maria de Iquique” for local TV. I also produced some public affairs pieces with Fernando Alegria about the Chilean coup.

After a 17-year heroic struggle, the Chilean people regained their democracy! May they serve as an inspiration to us to uphold ours in the face of fascist aggression. They are with us in California today and in the legacy of Joaquin Murieta’s resistance to anti-Latino racism. We are all connected.

Chile Lindo is presenting an International Woman’s Day Tribute to Nina Serrano with a film screening of “What Is To Be Done?/Que Hacer?” There will be a question and answer session with Nina Serrano, empanadas and wine at COVO, 981 Mission Street, San Francisco March 8, 2018, 6-9pm.

1970, Santiago, Chile. Director Nina Serrano, Cameraperson Gustavo Morris during the filming of “¿Que Hacer? /What is to be Done?”

“What Is to Be Done?” (“¿Qué Hacer?”) is a film produced in Chile in 1970, co-directed by Nina Serrano, Saul Landau, and Raúl Ruiz. Original music and lyrics by Country Joe McDonald. The film won awards at the Cannes, Venice, and Mannheim, Germany film festivals.

Nina Serrano is a San Francisco Bay Area poet, filmmaker, activist, and radio producer for KPFA’s “La Raza Chronicles” and “Open Book: the Poet to Poet Series”. At age 82, Nina Serrano published her first novel, “Nicaragua Way.”

In 1970, Nina Serrano invited Country Joe to join the film crew of “What Is to Be Done?” and thus he composed the lyrics and music score for the film, on location, in Chile.

Greg and Valerie Landau, Nina’s son and daughter, were teenagers at the time the film was made, and also joined the production crew in Chile.

Greg Landau, PhD, is an award-winning music/video producer, educator and music historian. He received nine Grammy nominations for his CD productions. He has produced numerous film and video sound tracks. He teaches Latin American and Latino/a Studies at City College of San Francisco.

Valerie Landau is an author and designer that serves as Director of Assessment at Samuel Merritt University where she designed a software application that facilitates analysis and assessment of how effectively an organization is meeting their goals and objectives at course, program, and institutional levels. She graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Department of Human Development and Psychology, with an emphasis in technology in education.

Here we are two octogenarians in love with poetry, featuring Maps Lie / Mienten los Mapas, a poem by Rafael Jesús González. Rafael’s words in Spanish and English were never more timely. Rafael Jesús González recently named the first poet laureate of Berkeley California has been a frequent guest on La Raza Chronicles radio over the years. His work is bilingual, topical, and universal. While his poems often address the latest problems we face and embrace anger at the injustices, they are always uplifting with deeply rooted spiritual values. Rafael writes in two languages, English and Spanish. His poems come to him in either language. perhaps reflecting his early formative years living on the US/Mexcian border of El Paso, Texas with its easy flow of language and culture, back and forth.

Maps Lie / Mienten los Mapas, a poem by Rafael Jesús González

We were recording Maps Lie / Mienten los Mapas, a poem by Rafael Jesús González for our regular KPFA-fm radio program “La Raza Chronicles”. My husband Paul Richards, who was engineering in our home studio wanted to add video to the session. So without makeup, set design, and whatever else, we just did it. Adding the camera, lavalier mics, and turning on some reading lamps. It was so much fun. We want to do this more often and offer the edited pieces as scheduled video posts. So, there will be more multimedia versions of Latino cultural and public affairs in the USA to come. Hope you enjoy this as much as we did! We’d love to hear from you at ninaserrano.com.

About Nina Serrano: Nina is a well-known, international prize-winning inspirational author and poet. With a focus on Latino history and culture, she is also a playwright, filmmaker, KPFA talk show host, a former Alameda County Arts Commissioner, and a co-founder of the San Francisco Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. Oakland Magazine’s “best local poet” in 2010, she is a former director of the San Francisco Poetry in the Schools program and the Bay Area’s Storytellers in the Schools program. A Latina activist for social justice, women’s rights, and the arts, Nina Serrano at 82 remains vitally engaged in inspiring change and exploring her abundant creativity. For more information go to ninaserrano.comor contact her publisher at estuarypress.com. For more detailed information about Nina see About Nina on her website.

About Estuary Press: Estuary Press is the publisher of Nicaragua Way. It is also the home of the Harvey Richards Media Archive, a repository of photography and video documentaries of various social change and political movements during the 1960s and 1970s. Contact Paul Richards (510) 967 5577, paulrichards@estuarypress.com or visit estuarypress.com for more details.

Ben Ben
You turned on the light
The town shining so bright
for the very first time
Oh Ben Linder
You watched all alone
so far from your home
to get the job done

Ben Ben
Changing wind and water to light
Making endless day of darkest night
People soared with the sight
Oh spirit of light
You lived to be free
so that others could be
Juggled with creativity
Bringing forth electricity
From darkness to light
Changing wrongs to right
We carry on your fight
til the dawn of pure light
on earth as it is in heaven

Ben Ben
Spirit of light
Making endless day of darkest night

About Nina Serrano: Nina is a well-known, international prize-winning inspirational author and poet. With a focus on Latino history and culture, she is also a playwright, filmmaker, KPFA talk show host, a former Alameda County Arts Commissioner, and a co-founder of the San Francisco Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. Oakland Magazine’s “best local poet” in 2010, she is a former director of the San Francisco Poetry in the Schools program and the Bay Area’s Storytellers in the Schools program. A Latina activist for social justice, women’s rights, and the arts, Nina Serrano at 82 remains vitally engaged in inspiring change and exploring her abundant creativity. For more information go to ninaserrano.comor contact her publisher at estuarypress.com. For more detailed information about Nina see About Nina on her website.

About Estuary Press: Estuary Press is the publisher of Nicaragua Way. It is also the home of the Harvey Richards Media Archive, a repository of photography and video documentaries of various social change and political movements during the 1960s and 1970s. Contact Paul Richards (510) 967 5577, paulrichards@estuarypress.com or visit estuarypress.com for more details.

1977, San Francisco. Community Theatre Arts Workshop Flyer by Jane Norling. Latin American Influences in San Francisco Theatre

Believe it or not, in the 1970s public media like KQED-TV was federally mandated to give public access to community groups. Seeing artist Jane Norling’s flyer for my bilingual acting workshops from the 1970’s evoked my memories of Latin American influences in San Francisco theatre local art scene. It was a time of great opportunity for community and minority artists to find training and performing around the Bay Area. KQED, our local public television station, broadcast the performances that our workshops created.

Jane Norling worked for the Neighborhood Arts Program, part of the San Francisco City Arts Commission. The city hired talented artists like Jane Norling and Joe Ramos among others, to help community arts groups reach larger audiences. In those days before the internet, flyers and posters were our major outreach tool. Xerox copying had just become widely available and we could print as many as 100 or 5000 flyers depending on our budgets.

My Latino focus came with me in my role as Artistic Director and Chief Administrator of Community Theater Arts Workshop, a non-profit always scrambling for small grants. The workshop announced in this flyer taught theater techniques popular in the people’s theater movement in Latin America. I had learned them working with two Latin American theatre artists: Cuban Huberto LLamas and Argentine Humberto Martinez, whose works deeply influenced and inspired me. I was eager to use them to mobilize people for change and help awaken to the world around them.

1973, San Francisco, California. Nina Serrano on the phone.

I first learned some of these techniques in Cuba in 1974-75 working with Huberto Llamas in rural theater. We trained peasants and dairy workers to use theater to solve their concrete daily problems by creating and acting in theaters productions for the local community. Working with Llamas among the cows, cowboys, and milkmaids was not so different theatrically from my earlier experience in San Francisco before and after the Summer of Love (1967-1968). I was developing and directing an agitprop truck theatre that roamed the streets performing musical skits for peace during the Viet Nam War from the back of a pickup truck. We had to gather an audience on the sidewalk, get our message out fast, using a sound generator for the music and signs for the dialog and then, take off pronto before the police showed up.

In Cuba, where we did not have to run from the police, I joined Llamas in leading group discussions that included a community social worker to pin point the issues. We used improvisation, movement exercises, and theater games to explore the problems and to build the actor’s craft. Slowly a storyline with themes would emerge and we would create a play. The larger community would support our work building beautiful outdoor stages bedecked with palm fronds and greenery. I was always amazed at their great enthusiasm and skills. The beautiful Caribbean sky was the backdrop.

When I returned to San Francisco, I met Argentine political refugee and theater artist Humberto Martinez. He came from Argentina during the years of the dirty war (1976-83) because of his association with the outlawed leftist Monteneros group. He was forced to flee to San Francisco after he had produced the Chilean miner’s strike story “La Cantata de Santa Maria de Iquique” in Argentina performed by a group of workers. We met through my association with a trio of impoverished Argentine refugees. They were avant-garde theater performers who I fed and housed briefly. They introduced me to Humberto while he was recreating La Cantata again here in the Bay Area. This time he was working with a group of local Chicano and Chilean immigrant cannery workers in a church in San Jose. Unlike Llamas who created his scripts from the community to help solve their problems, Martinez worked from the recording of Quilapayún’s “La Cantata de Santa Maria de Iquique” to create the physical movements for the cannery workers performing La Cantata. In my work with Llamas and Martinez, the theatre proved to an effective way to mobilize people for change and help awaken them to the world around them.

Jane Norling’s flyer announced a series of long ago classes that I remember with great satisfaction. In the days before the digital revolution, Latin American theater influences traveled with me in stacks of flyers I carried to post at cafes, laundromats, and other places where the flood of Latin American immigrants gathered as I went through my days. Those cluttered billboards kept me in tune with the local arts scene and helped recruit students and actors to appear on our KQED Open Studio productions by Community Theater Arts. They helped create today’s rich multicultural arts community here in the San Francisco Bay Area that is a lively part of the resistance movement and makes San Francisco a sanctuary city.

About Nina Serrano: Nina is a well-known, international prize-winning inspirational author and poet. With a focus on Latino history and culture, she is also a playwright, filmmaker, KPFA talk show host, a former Alameda County Arts Commissioner, and a co-founder of the San Francisco Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. Oakland Magazine’s “best local poet” in 2010, she is a former director of the San Francisco Poetry in the Schools program and the Bay Area’s Storytellers in the Schools program. A Latina activist for social justice, women’s rights, and the arts, Nina Serrano at 82 remains vitally engaged in inspiring change and exploring her abundant creativity. For more information go to ninaserrano.comor contact her publisher at estuarypress.com. For more detailed information about Nina see About Nina on her website.

About Estuary Press: Estuary Press is the publisher of Nicaragua Way. It is also the home of the Harvey Richards Media Archive, a repository of photography and video documentaries of various social change and political movements during the 1960s and 1970s. Contact Paul Richards (510) 967 5577, paulrichards@estuarypress.com or visit estuarypress.com for more details.

My youthful college experiences in Wisconsin were inspired by the civil rights movement and my friendship with Jim and Anne McWilliams. Then in 1961, I moved to San Francisco where I lept into the post beatnik whirl of the Bay Area’s international multi-lingual immigrant communities among the parents of today’s Dreamers.

Our place, they said, was in the home

My friend Anne and I would never have imagined that a half a century later young immigrants like her brought to the US as babies and children would openly and militantly fight for their right to education in a movement called the “Dreamers.” As women in those years, our fight went on quietly as we struggled to raise our children and pursue our own education. It was hard to get called on in class, or have our voices heard at a meeting, or to endure the whispers that went on behind our backs for breaking the norms. Social conventions, university officials, and even professors didn’t approve of mothers going back to school in those years. Our place, they said, was in the home. We met with a wall of disapproval. It wasn’t until decades later that adult women were welcomed into classrooms as returning students. What a contrast to today’s young women loudly taking their case before Congress demanding their civil and human rights.

As a young bohemian, I felt very alone in the mid western Madison mainstream culture, with its cheerleaders, and mostly white student body peppered with a sprinkling of foreign students. I was so lonely until I met Anne. We joined forces and formed a parent childcare coop with other mothers so we could attend classes.

In 1961, when I settled in the barrio in the Mission District of San Francisco, I reconnected with my Latino roots that I had left behind in New York City where I lived until age 19. Madison, Wisconsin was a culture shock for me after the multi-cultural environment of NYC, Spanish Harlem, Greenwich Village, and my pursuit of professional theater training.

The fight for justice and civil rights burst into the open in San Francisco

The fight for justice and civil rights burst into the open in San Francisco, when, in 1968, a broad coalition of San Francisco State students organized in the Third World Liberation Front and struck for expanding enrollment to include minority students and the creation of Ethnic Studies programs. I jumped from the anti-Vietnam war truck theater I had been directing back into the struggle for civil rights and justice in defense of Los Siete de la Raza, a group of seven Central American youths falsely accused of murdering a San Francisco policeman. I covered the Los Siete trials as a reporter for the San Francisco alternative press, the San Francisco Good Times. I joined the San Francisco poetry scene through readings at Basta Ya, the coffee house run by the Los Siete Defense Committee, as a venue to raise funds and consciousness. There, through my fellow poets, I joined the Latino publishing collective Editorial Pocho Che. Once again, I found myself immersed in a romantic political milieu. This time, the romance went beyond personal romantic love to poetic immersion in the international struggle against the Vietnam war and anti imperialist struggles in Latin America. This is the setting of my novel, Nicaragua Way, inside an international community fighting for justice at home and for liberation in Nicaragua.

These communities of resistance have intergrated themselves into the life of our cities and set the stage for today’s Dreamers. The inspiration I felt as a participant in the resistance movement for Nicaragua in the 1970s gave rise to my novel where I portrayed that world for today’s readers to share and deepen their historical understanding.

Women’s voices were becoming louder

During this period, women’s voices were becoming louder. Around the corner from my San Francisco home, a women’s consciousness raising group met weekly in my dear friend Judith Knoop’s house. A single mother of three, Judith was a leader and spokesperson for welfare mothers demanding their rights. As a result of these meetings, Judith returned to school in the San Francisco State University nursing program, graduating with honors. The women’s liberation movement was making space for women’s voices in everything. As a registered nurse, Judith focused on women’s health care and set up the first San Francisco women’s health center in a store front in the Mission barrio providing services for immigrant women. Later her program was integrated into the San Francisco General Hospital’s women’s health and birthing programs. From efforts like these, women’s health issues were forced into our national consciousness. Judith passed away a few years ago and was honored for her work in a memorial meeting of over 200 people. More women and mothers today are enrolled in schools, including growing numbers of immigrants. These gains for women’s health and education have now come under attack from the Trump administration.

The “Dreamers” are valiantly fighting for their right to an education. Women are among the leadership of this movement. They are called Dreamers after a law that has yet to be passed called “Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act.” These young students today are threatened with mass deportations and the break up of their families as well as being excluded from our schools and jobs. The Dreamers demand their education and their right to stay in our country as part of their human rights. It is a new phase of the struggle that began in the movement to end segregation. It expands the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for equality and justice for all.

Keep the dream alive

By Faviana Rodriguez

Today, my friendship with Jim, and Anne is still strong. We are now all over 80, living in the San Francisco Bay Area, and still are laughing over Jim’s jokes. We try to keep the dream alive by re-enforcing the resistance against the policies and ideology of this current hate-filled administration. Anne works on administrating and singing with a freedom song chorus that performs at protest events. Jim works as an advocate for mental health patients and often recites Dr King’s words and narrates civil rights history. As a poet, author, film maker and radio producer, I continue working to keep the dream alive.

Today, as a woman writer, I look back on my civil rights movement activism and understand its role so many decades later in creating my first novel, Nicaragua Way, a story about a woman in the resistance movement.

As a young woman, I heard Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on radio during the March on Washington in 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr. called our constitution “a promissory note . . . a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” In those days, we all assumed that “men” meant “human being.” Although literally it did not specifically include women. In the same way that “people” in our constitution really meant white men and usually only property owners. But today with end of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and its threat of massive deportations (see part 2) as well as the “Me too” movement revealing the widespread assaults on women, the word “men” can no longer be assumed to include women. We must revise our language to revise our consciousness. But, back then we activist women accommodated and continued holding up half the sky while working to make that “promissory note” pay up.

Remembering my own path to hearing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic moment takes me back sixty years. It was a sunny spring day in 1958, five years before his speech, when my best friend Anne and I were sitting in the Student Cafeteria as students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. We were two mothers of young children enjoying each other’s company in stolen moments from childcare, housework, classes and homework. We were daughters of immigrant families. Anne had arrived as an infant with her family from Russia. I was born here but my father was born in Colombia. In those University years, we were trying to fit in, to find our way as best we could, as young people all do.

I was a pregnant 23 year old mother of a toddler and Anne had two little girls. We were soon joined at our table by a tall handsome man who introduced himself as Jim McWilliams. He was a black activist law student in the civil rights movement who came from Alabama. He was charming, funny and made us laugh. It turned out all three of us supported Martin Luther King, Jr. and his principals of equality. Dr. King’s name and ideas were just emerging on our campus after the news of the Montgomery Bus boycott of 1955 and ’56. We were inspired by the southern Black movement to end legal racial segregation and followed the events in the south closely. Those moments in the student union cafeteria, when Jim and Anne were bitten by the love bug while we were all full of ardor for civil rights burned into my memory and laid the foundation for the stories of women in resistance that I wrote in Nicaragua Way. Love added spark to our friendships and the electric energy of our soon-to-be realized collective efforts.

Dr King’s organization, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, (SCLC) organized Black churches to demand civil rights, focusing on desegregation and voting rights. SCLC followed the Gandhian principles of nonviolence that helped gain India its independence back in 1947. In 1955, Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat on a segregated public bus and the Birmingham, Alabama bus boycott began. We were excited by that and discussed it.

Not long after our 1960 conversations, southern Black students staged a non-violent sit-in at a Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina. They refused to leave the white-only lunch counter, demanding an end to segregation. We immediately organized sympathetic picket lines at the off-campus local downtown Woolworths. After the Woolworths campaign, the southern Black students organized the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”.)

Within weeks we led a march of thousands to the State Capital Building in Madison to support the southern civil rights movement. We brought southern activist Black students from the Woolworths campaign to speak at our campus along with prominent SCLC leaders. I will never forget two thousand students singing “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the civil rights movement, in the Madison campus Student Union Theater. Jim soon became the president of a student civil rights organization with a student government budget. We then recruited people to go south to participate in the dangerous 1960 Freedom Bus Rides to integrate inter-state busses.

I left the University for San Francisco with my husband and two children in 1961. Jim and Anne went on to bring major black intellectual figures like W.E.B. Dubois and Malcom X to the campus to lecture and interact with the student body. We stayed connected and I enjoyed Anne’s letters telling how she cooked delicious dinners for these prestigious visitors. Anne and Jim’s relationship deepened. The campus group went on to organize support for the 1964 Mississippi Summer to work on voter registration. Men and women risked their lives to end injustice and expand the rights of all of us to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These early experiences where romance and political activism were intertwined inspired me to recreate them in my novel about other solidarity work later that also helped change the world.

My updated website holds many products of my life’s work in supporting world peace, civil and human rights as both an artist and organizer. Traveling this road led me to encourage the growth of Latino/USA culture and political rights with my artistic and community work, locally and globally.

My poetry, writings, plays, films, and radio programs helped break the blockade of ideas about the Cuban revolution and the Nicaraguan Sandinista revolution. I created works in film, radio, theater, art exhibits, and poetry to support the fight against the Chilean coup. For many years, I worked to end violence against women here and internationally. Since 1968 I have been involved in popularizing the poetry of Roque Dalton, El Salvador’s national poet, and my friend and co-author. Also I work towards restorative justice for him and his family. All along this road of struggle for social justice.

Storytelling evolved in me as an outgrowth of work with and for children in creative drama, poetry, theatre, film and radio. The birth of my grandchildren propelled me into this oral performance tradition.

My earliest performances began at street fairs and malls. I adopted a storytelling persona “The Fairy Godmother” to work regularly at Children’s Fairyland (Oakland).

After touring my musical play for children, The Story of the Chicken Made of Rags, for which my brother, Philip Serrano, composed the music, the time came for this popular Serrano Caribbean folk tale to be recorded. My son, 5-time Grammy Award nominee Greg Landau, assembled a group of prominent musicians including singer Holly Near, the Nicaraguan Atlantic Coast band Soul Vibrations, John Santos, and Barbara Dane, and produced the CD available through this web site. (Click here to preview and/or buy).
In the 1990’s I served as storytelling director for Stagebridge, a senior theatre company developing storytelling in the schools programs. I taught classes for storytellers, trained teachers and worked in the schools and senior centers.

In the 21st century I began Stagebridge bilingual storytelling programs at senior residences and centers. In 2002 I wrote my Master’s thesis on “The Storytelling Movement And The Need For New Myths” (Naropa University). I wrote the Stagebridge manual PASS IT ON! How to Start Your Own Storytelling Program in the School.

I began writing in 1968 at age 36, when I wrote a video drama with Roque Dalton for Cuban TV. Dalton was an exiled Salvadoran writer living in Havana. My concern for his safety inspired my first poem in 1969, as he prepared to join the Salvadoran revolutionaries to liberate his country from the military dictatorship. At the time of the poem’s publication in an alternative SF newspaper, Express, I could only use his initials in the title and refer to El Salvador as “unknown terrain.”

TO ROQUE DALTON BEFORE LEAVING TO FIGHT IN EL SALVADOR
(Havana, 1969)*

Mass media I adore you.
With a whisper in the microphone
I touch the mass belly against mine
like on a rush hour bus
but with no sweat and no embarrassment.
“Don’t die,” I whispered, in person.
Only the air and revolutionary slogans hung
between us.
“When I die I’ll wear a big smile.”
And with his finger painted a clown’s smile
on his Indian face
“Don’t die!” the whisper beneath the call to battle.
My love of man in conflict
with my love for this man.

Women die too.
They let go their tight grip on breath and sigh,
and sigh to die.
They say that Tania died before Che.
I saw her die in a Hollywood movie.
Her blood floated in the river.
I stand in the street in Havana.
There are puddles here
but few consumer goods to float in them.
Here the blood is stirred by the sacrifice of smiles
to armed struggle.
A phrase and an act.
They leave one day and they are dead.
“Death to the known order. Birth to the unknown.”
Blood. Blood. Blood.
The warmth of it between the thighs
soothes the channel
the baby fights and tears.

I stand by a puddle in Havana
a woman full of blood
not yet spilled.
Can I spill blood by my own volition?
Now it flows from me by a call of the moon;
The moon …
a woman mopping her balcony
spills water from her bucket
on my hair, my breasts
and into the puddle.
The question is answered.